Zwarte Beertjes  

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Collection of 21 Dutch translations of 'romans durs' by Georges Simenon, in the Zwarte Beertjes collection, cover designs by Dick Bruna. Photo © JWG
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Collection of 21 Dutch translations of 'romans durs' by Georges Simenon, in the Zwarte Beertjes collection, cover designs by Dick Bruna.
Photo © JWG

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Zwarte Beertjes (Dutch for little black bears) is a book imprint of paperback books started in 1955 by A.W. Bruna & Zoon in The Netherlands. With this, the publisher joined the trend of popular paperback series, namely the Prisma-pockets of Het Spectrum and the Salamander-pockets of Querido. The logo of the series was designed by Dick Bruna, who also made many cover designs for the series and thus contributed greatly to its unique character.

Well known among his designs are those for Simenon's Maigret books, typified by graphic silhouettes of a pipe on various backgrounds.

Launch price of the Zwarte Beertjes was fl. 1.50, slightly more than the Prisma-pockets that cost fl. 1.25 at the time. Zwarte Beertjes 1 was "De dood van apotheker Dekkinga" by Tjeerd Adema.

Like the competing series, the Zwarte Beertjes series was a heterogeneous mixture of fiction and non-fiction books, although the emphasis was more on the 'thrillers', with the top titles (in number of titles) being Georges Simenon (160 titles, the majority of which are Maigret-books), Leslie Charteris (The Saint), Jean Bruce (OSS 117), Peter Cheyney, Ed McBain, and Havank. The ten books by the Swedish writing duo Sjöwall & Wahlöö and the James Bond books by Ian Fleming were also bestsellers in the series. Literary fiction pur sang was also featured, with names like Norman Mailer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Remco Campert, John Galsworthy (the Forsyte Sage) and the plays of William Shakespeare.

Another notable 'Zwart Beertje' was number 1090 (The Little Red Book by Mao Zedong).

Comic strips were also on offer, notably Peanuts-books by Charles M. Schulz and more recently the Garfield-comics by Jim Davis.

In the 1970s, a number of "genres" were put into separate paperback series, in the same format as the Zwarte Beertjes: Bruna SF (science fiction), Bruna FeH (fantasy and horror), and Bruna Crime Classics (crime stories). However, these series were of limited duration.

A.W. Bruna became part of the PCM publishing group in the 1990s; however, the Zwarte Beertjes series continued to exist and now also included books supplied by other publishers in the group such as Meulenhoff, Het Spectrum, Prometheus, De Boekerij or Unieboek. In addition to bestselling authors such as Tom Clancy, Clive Cussler or John Grisham, the series currently also gives a lot of space to popular romance (Catherine Cookson, Judith Krantz), fantasy (W.J. Maryson) and horror (R.L. Stine with the Fear Street books for a youthful audience). However, the frontrunner in terms of number of titles at the moment is certainly Gérard de Villiers, whose SAS series of adventure novels approaches and may exceed Georges Simenon's books in number.

In the 2004/2005 season, the series celebrated its fiftieth anniversary; this was accompanied by a number of special actions, including luxury editions of a number of classic Zwarte Beertjes as "Gouden Beertjes".

See also

Dutch graphic design




Unless indicated otherwise, the text in this article is either based on Wikipedia article "Zwarte Beertjes" or another language Wikipedia page thereof used under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License; or on research by Jahsonic and friends. See Art and Popular Culture's copyright notice.

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